Click on the "core" above to follow us, here is more than just the game
Developed by Flying Wild Hog in collaboration with independent producer Leonard Menchiari, Trek to Yomi, released by Devolver Digital, went on sale on May 5.
Unity is a certain end point of the game
Immersion, an extremely simple word. Today, when games continue to achieve technological innovation and popularization of industrialization, how to improve immersion has gradually become the main issue facing the development of games. After the game industry has been honed by countless works, people have a preliminary understanding of the method of creating immersion, although it is not a panacea or can bring people a flash of experience, but as long as this idea is followed, the finished game will not deviate from the instincts that people will have when experiencing the game.
Trek to Yomi clearly has this quest for immersion as well. In my 5-hour gaming experience, this immersive presentation was pretty good. In addition to the special color grading to show the style of the sword blade, the game also shows the character position and battle process by setting a fixed camera position, horizontal and vertical screen combined with the form of presenting levels. Obviously, the game reflects the immersion that the production team pursues through the most intuitive picture - that is, the process experience is close to entering the same picture style of the movie, and the player can simulate the state of entering the movie world by manipulating the characters to substitute the perspective into the game.
The depth of field is emphasized by the fixed camera and the special contrast of the monochrome film, the shallow greenery and the high walls in the depths
This type of fixed camera is borrowed for classic film shooting methods, and the advantage is that the position connection between people and scenes can be highlighted, and provide a position for the construction of more layers of scenery, increasing the depth of field. But it's also not a perfect solution—in the process of my experience, there will be almost no visual obstacles between the scenery and the levels, causing me to spend time on many roads. There are many places where I thought I could walk through, but actually there were looming obstacles, and after more of this, I lost interest in exploring many small rooms and hidden areas set up in the game: these small rooms or areas are usually set up with three types of pickable items, namely growth items (which add maximum health and maximum stamina after pickup), atmospheric items (supplemental explanations for the story background and in-game world view items), and throwable items. At this point, the producers compromised on gameplay. Although I feel that the producers have a touching dedication to constructing the movie world experience from the perspective of the entire game experience, they still add these items to the game to enrich the game content and gameplay.
Legend has it that the goddess of cherry blossoms, Kihana Yahime, destroyed the peaks of Mt. Yagatake
But this game can be considered a single if only from the gameplay point of view: from the beginning to the end you basically only need to fight through the most basic knife skills, and the process of fighting is very fast, ordinary robbers only need one knife or two knives to solve, encounter elite-level enemies, and only need a few rounds to divide the victory and defeat. Elite enemies have more health, but the game provides players with moves that can stun the enemy, and the enemy can be directly executed after being stunned, and the hero's health will be restored after execution.
Although weapons do not constitute a gameplay, the knife itself has variations
As the game progresses, the knife itself unlocks some skills with combo traits. It's not so much a sign of growth as it becomes part of the "hard growth" of the game's flow. The constantly unlocked moves are not skills that can be actively released and increased the upper limit of operation, but more like variations of basic knife skills. For example, the trick in the previous figure that can stun an elite enemy needs to be unlocked in the process. And it is not a trait that grows out exclusively to the protagonist, but more like the protagonist has fundamentally grown through battle.
However, still out of the consideration of style experience, the game sets the upper limit of operation for the player by setting the character action module, and the action of the character in the game tries to restore the real slash and defense from the greatest extent, from this point of view, the production team's attempt is successful. But on the other hand, the production team's consideration of setting the position of the skill group may not be perfect for the previous reasons. Taking the most basic light attack as an example, if the character uses a tap while moving forward, the character will directly charge the front spur, while if the light attack is standing, it can quickly slash twice. In the enemies I encountered throughout the process (normal difficulty), most of the enemies only needed two taps to knock down, but many times I wanted to tap, because I accidentally pressed the joystick and released the charge forward spur, this skill forward shake is extremely long, so I am often grabbed by ordinary enemies to shake the interval attack of the front shake, forced to interrupt the skill release. But that's not actually a skill I actively chose. This kind of problem of releasing inaccurate releases due to too many skill sets is not uncommon in games.
But these problems can be solved by the most basic combat method, that is, bullet counter-attack. Bouncing is a basic skill that you can use at the beginning of the game. The vast majority of enemies will enter the hard straight after the bullet counterattack, exposing the opportunity to attack. This is almost the perfect combat solution and works in all scenarios. But in this way, my combat experience began to narrow in a straight line, all the levels were spent in the process of bouncing, attacking, bouncing, and attacking, and all the other skills I learned suddenly became dispensable, because those skills that were long and long but looked more ornamental did not actually improve my combat efficiency. In contrast, the two knives I swung after the perfect block were monotonous but effective enough.
These settings are also understood by me as examples of compromises towards playfulness and immersion. As the demo report points out, although the game is highly complete in terms of graphics, music, and style, and has extremely brilliant art design, the gameplay has made a substantial compromise in order to achieve the goal of overall unity. Judging from the Unreal Engine used in game development and the combat logic shown by the game, it was obvious that the development team could implement richer features for the game, but for the sake of a unified experience, the development team abandoned this part to increase immersion. Players have a different opinion on such an approach. For me personally, I can actually appreciate and appreciate this courage – even if the final product doesn't necessarily give players the feeling of "this game is very fun", but the production team can really achieve self-pursuit of developing the game itself in this way. From this point of view, Trek to Yomi achieves the unity from the graphics to the gameplay, from the theme to the gameplay.
Pros and cons as well as purchasing advice
Strong style games often come with their own advantages and disadvantages of self-selection. For example, the filter used in this work is not just to adjust the picture to a bright color, but first after color modeling, and then use a special filter for rendering, the color of the picture is not completely black or white, but reduces the contrast between the two, making the picture look softer, more saturated, and more obvious. At the same time, black and white filters can highlight the focus of the picture and mask unimportant details. This approach does a good job of presenting the picture itself, allowing the player to ignore the parts of the picture that are not well detailed. If the player looks closely, it can be found that in many places, the game's polishing of the screen details is not enough, but because of the use of special filters, these problems can be well avoided, and even become part of the style embodiment.
As for the drawbacks, in addition to the more monotonous gameplay and the road guidance problems I mentioned earlier, I have not encountered particularly unacceptable shortcomings in the progression of my progress to the later stages of the game, although the story may not be particularly attractive - such a graphic and linear flow of the story mode should actually be accompanied by a more engaging script, but it has to be said that the whole story is still relatively decent in terms of overall, and the creation according to the method is basically no risky part. However, the quality of the story itself is excellent. For genre reasons, I won't spoil it here, but I can guarantee that the story won't disappoint you or waste your time. The whole game doesn't take long, about 10 hours, and if you focus on completing the level, the game flow can be shorter.
In addition to these, although the items picked up in the game do not play much role in the gameplay itself, you can still feel the developer's intention to be able to tell and enrich the background of the story through the items. Some items left behind by civilians tell short stories of ordinary people, while others tell some ancient legends. Judging from the items alone, they do play a role in enriching the cultural content of the game.
From an experiential point of view, I am personally satisfied with the game throughout the game because I think the style of the game is presented to a standard that I can ignore the combat and other gameplay. Even, I think the development team should have enough confidence in this style of play to get rid of other parts that are inherently dispensable to them and make the game serve a purer sense of immersion.
So I personally highly recommend this game to all players who like Sword Blade. If you are an indie game lover or an action game lover, then you can also try this game. But if you have requirements for the game's combat system, then I recommend that you play with caution. The quality of the game's content itself is excellent, and you will never waste ten hours of time.
Configure and play
The game is relatively friendly for all configured computers. My computer can stabilize at around 60 frames at full HD, but my computer has recently had problems with heat dissipation, and it will be forced to downgrade when entering all games, so it will suddenly drop frames when playing, and everything else is fine, and there are no bugs.
The game will be released on May 5, Steam is priced at 79.2 yuan, the first time into XGP. If you're interested in the subject matter and graphics, try this game about samurai finding their way and saving lives and themselves.
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